


Best Pair You'll Ever Wear

by Mosca



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Bodyswap, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Magical Underpants, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:34:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21584041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: Lovett and Tommy discover that the new free underwear from a Crooked Media sponsor has unexpected bonus features.
Relationships: Jon Lovett/Tommy Vietor
Comments: 9
Kudos: 51





	Best Pair You'll Ever Wear

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains body image and food issues, canon-consistent references to American politics, pornography use, delicious breakfast sandwiches, and adorable dogs. It takes place in the alternate universe where Lovett and Tommy are both single.
> 
> This was going to be a longer thing and might still become a multi-part series, but it was doing nobody any good gathering dust in Google Docs. It is a stand-alone for now.
> 
> Thanks to Footnoterphone, Lovessong, and Celli for beta reading and/or encouragement at various points.

It starts with a freebie box from Tommy John. Lovett likes the freebies from Tommy John, because if not for them, he would never buy new underpants. Most of the freebies are first-come-first-served, and if Favreau is stuck with the hilarious comedy prints that Emily won't bang him in, that's his problem. But this box contains a stack of envelopes, each labeled with the name of a Crooked Media host. Plus one for Spencer, because Tommy John understands that Spencer is real.

The ones assigned to Lovett are striped cotton relaxed fit boxers. Fuck that noise. Lovett opens each envelope, in search of the best pair. Vietor got the flamingo print, that bastard. They're square cut, which is a little daring for Lovett's taste, and probably a size too small. But flamingo print. Lovett tucks the striped ones into Tommy's envelope, reseals it convincingly, and makes off with his brand new extra-soft flamingo shorts.

Lovett puts forth a real effort at the gym that evening, and his new flamingo shorts are his reward. They’re a little tight, but in a way that makes his package look bigger and his ass look rounder, both of which are a bonus at his gym, which is the kind of West Hollywood situation where nobody even pretends to avert their eyes in the locker room. He gets some lingering gazes, and he smiles but doesn’t make eye contact. He’s had exactly the right number of random gym hookups to know they’re not really his thing, and that number is three.

He goes home, walks Pundit, tries to convince himself that baked salmon and steamed broccoli are a delicious and filling dinner, and rage-reads think pieces about impeachment until he falls asleep.

Lovett’s alarm goes off six hours later, and he pads resentfully to the bathroom before his morning run. His feet feel too far from his head, or his room has stretched, or his t-shirt is simultaneously too big and too small. He needs coffee and a sad brick of ostensibly peanut-butter-flavored low-carb food substitute, but before that he needs to pee.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches his reflection, except that it’s not his. That is Tommy’s face. 

He flips on the light and assesses the situation with a more critical eye, as much as he can muster at 5:30 in the morning. Tommy’s face is attached to Tommy’s neck, and below the hem of Lovett’s slightly stained Let Me Be Perfectly Queer t-shirt are Tommy’s impeccably sculpted, possibly waxed abs. Lovett would scream, but if he does, he’ll piss himself. 

He takes out Tommy’s dick, gets that problem taken care of, and sees he’s still wearing the flamingo underpants. He suspects the underpants are responsible. It doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes deranged Lindsay Lohan movie sense. 

Lovett washes Tommy’s hands and then gets his phone, which it takes a minute to unlock because he tries five times before he realizes that the biometrics can’t recognize Tommy’s fingerprints. He has twelve texts from Tommy. They’re all variations on “I don’t know what the fuck happened, but can I please have my body back?”

“I think it has something to do with the new Tommy John freebies,” Lovett texts back. “Meet me at the office. Bring your new underpants.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO, LOVETT” comes back so fast, Lovett’s pretty sure Tommy had it queued.

“I’m sorry, I swapped because I liked your underpants better than mine, I didn’t know it would have FUCKING MAGICAL CONSEQUENCES”

There is a silence. Lovett searches for some clothes to wear to work that will somewhat fit Tommy. By the time he has located a t-shirt that doesn’t leave a sexy but inappropriate gap, and a pair of drawstring shorts that don’t fall down if he ties them tight enough, Tommy has texted back, “That seems reasonable.”

Even after Lovett has spent ten confusing minutes adjusting his car seat so he can reach the pedals and steering wheel with Tommy’s unnecessarily long limbs, traffic to the office is refreshingly light at this hour. Lovett sips coffee, gnaws a protein bar, and tries not to panic. When he arrives, Tommy’s car is already there; Lovett parks next to it. 

An individual who looks like Lovett’s evil twin is sitting on the strip of grass in front of the building, eating something that looks and smells suspiciously like a breakfast sandwich. “What are you putting in my body?” Lovett shouts, waving his arms so emphatically that coffee arcs from his travel mug onto the pavement. 

“I was hungry, and you drive like my grandmother, so I picked up breakfast,” Tommy says. Lovett feels like he’s listening to old podcast episodes, saying things he forgot he ever said. 

“Is that bacon? And cheese? Do you want me to die fat and alone?”

“It’s really good,” Tommy says. “Unusually good. They must have made it extra fresh, or something.”

“I’m happy for you,” Lovett says. “Now, can we swap our underpants back so you can put that filth in your own body?”

They go inside, try to look natural as they wave hello to the smattering of morning people who have shown up to work before 8:00 AM, and each claim a stall in the men’s room. Lovett takes off the flamingo underpants and slides them under the stall divider; Tommy gives him the striped shorts in return. As Lovett puts the shorts on, he feels a moment of vertigo and grabs the toilet paper dispenser to steady himself. When his head clears, he’s back in his own body, and he has to admit his assigned underwear fits really well.

“Hey, want to go to the break room and finish breakfast?”

“You can finish that demon sandwich all by yourself,” Lovett says. “But yeah, we should probably talk.”

Tommy bought an extra sandwich, of course. He takes the whole one for himself, since his body hasn’t had anything except coffee and half of an unpleasant protein bar. Lovett almost declines the remaining half-sandwich that Tommy started, but it smells way too good to throw away. It’s not the best bacon egg & cheese of his lifetime, but he doesn’t want to harsh Tommy’s glow. 

“The one thing I can’t figure out,” Lovett says, “is why there was a delay. I put the flamingo underpants on after I showered at the gym, but I was myself when I went to sleep.”

“I didn’t put the striped ones on until this morning when I got up,” Tommy says. “So maybe we both have to be wearing them at the same time.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” Lovett chews, swallows, and slams his sandwich down. “Wait. That makes sense? What are we talking about? None of this makes any fucking sense.”

“I guess it makes sense if you’ve seen a bunch of movies from the ‘80s,” Tommy says.

“Those movies would have been shorter if people had been smarter,” Lovett says. “Magical underpants. Come on. How hard is it to figure this stuff out?”

They look at each other silently for a moment before letting all the laughter out.

“So if you want,” Tommy says, “maybe over the weekend we can swap again? When nobody’s expecting us to be, you know, us. It just seems like a shame to waste magical underpants.”

One of Lovett’s favorite things about Tommy is his ability to say very funny things with such a straight face that people think he’s taking himself seriously. Lovett wonders if he could acquire this ability by spending enough time in Tommy’s skin. “Sure. As long as you promise to stop feeding me bacon.”

Saturday does not come soon enough, but suddenly, there it is, and there Lovett is, ringing Tommy’s doorbell with a freshly washed pair of striped boxers in a little bag. He’s put his driver’s license and health insurance ID in the bag too, because he does not want his body arrested or denied hospital admittance while he’s not in control of it. Also his gym membership card, as a hint that he is happy to let Tommy take his body out for an hour of cardio that he will not personally have to experience.

“Okay,” Tommy says. “Let’s do this.”

They trade underpants. Tommy goes in his bedroom, and Lovett goes in the guest room. A minute later, Tommy knocks on the guest room door in Lovett’s body to hand him a t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Tommy himself is wearing nothing but the striped boxers, as if it were perfectly normal to expose Lovett’s pasty torso to daylight. Lovett gathers up the clothes he wore on the way and hands them over. “The ID was a good idea,” Tommy says, still mortifyingly shirtless. “I’ll give you mine before you leave.”

They agree to return to Tommy’s house at six in the evening, which gives Lovett eight hours in a borrowed body. He’s not sure what to do with it. Normally, on a Saturday off with no firm plans, he’d text all his friends until he found someone similarly unencumbered and go to an escape room or a movie or something. But most of Lovett’s non-work friends don’t know Tommy, and his work friends know Tommy well enough that they’d get suspicious if Lovett tried to impersonate him. 

So it’s just him and the dog. He goes home, coats himself in sunscreen because he does not want to be responsible for Tommy’s body getting skin cancer, and takes Pundit to the dog beach. Pundit loves the dog beach, but Lovett doesn’t: he has to either suffer from comparison to the toned and sculpted guys around him, or be the only dork on the beach who refuses to take off his t-shirt. It’s relaxing to like how he looks. Lovett and Pundit chase each other around in the shallow surf, then play Frisbee fetch until Pundit runs out of steam and takes a nap on Lovett’s towel. It’s the first time since he adopted her that she’s gotten tired before he has. 

He sits cross-legged on the towel, scratching Pundit’s lazy head, and watches the dog parents of Santa Monica go by. He knows, now, what it feels like to see an impossibly tall, thin woman with perfect windswept hair and want desperately to take her out of her bikini top and too-short shorts, and to think that if he asked, she might want him to. Lovett makes an effort not to be the guy who leers at girls, but the men who have always caught his eye still do, with their well-manicured gym bodies and their tight butts curving under their swim trunks. He tries to clear his brain. Old lady over there - beautiful, the way the lines crinkle out from her eyes and lips, and her skin would be soft. Short, fat guy over here - he’d be warm, like one big sex hug. Tommy’s body is determined to find a way to desire every adult person on this beach, to see not just the pleasure but the humanity in the possibility. Lovett had not expected people-watching to be so fraught with danger.

Tommy’s stomach informs Lovett that it’s past time for lunch, not with the urgent, gnawing, stress-fueled hunger he’s used to, but with a polite growl. Lovett takes Pundit to a dog-friendly cafe, where they set her up quickly with water and a biscuit shaped like a cupcake. Lovett overanalyzes the menu, interpreting every item in terms of what Tommy likes to eat and will not be mad at him for eating. He ends up getting a chicken-topped salad and unsweetened iced tea, boring but unobjectionable. 

He still has a bunch of time left. Not sure what else to do with himself, he goes home, puts some Real Housewives on in the background, and catches up on reading about some potential discussion topics for the podcast. He gets some good notes written, a few proto-jokes. Is he wasting his body swap time by working? Maybe, but he likes to work. Days off make him antsy.

He can’t stop thinking about the people at the beach, though, the ones he never would have given a second look but is now fantasizing about inviting home for a wild sex party full of fascinating strangers. As much as he’d like to keep working, his boner has become insistent. He fires up the usual porn, and as luck would have it, Tommy’s body also has a thing for twink blow jobs. After a couple of minutes, however, the usual porn feels like a wasted opportunity. With a few clicks, he tracks down some socially responsible independent lesbian porn, for which he responsibly pays. There’s such variety to the bodies: from thin to curvy to lusciously fat, every skin tone and hair texture, tattoos and piercings, scars and stretch marks. The anthropology lesson doesn’t last long before he gets off.

Lovett doesn’t have much time before he needs to get back to Tommy’s, so he washes up, feeds the dog, and heads out. Just when he thinks he’s gotten used to all this, he momentarily seizes with horror at the sight of his own body answering Tommy’s door. He’s ready to get back to normal. 

They swap back, uneventfully. 

Before Lovett can contemplate whether it would be awkward to ask if he can hang around for a while, Tommy is getting beers out of the fridge and straddling a stool at his kitchen island. “So what did you do all day?” Tommy asks as Lovett clambers onto the other stool.

“I took Pundit to the dog beach,” Lovett says. “Ate lunch, worked, masturbated.”

Tommy’s face looks like the sound of car tires screeching. 

“Wait, you didn’t?” Lovett says.

“No, I -” Tommy rubs his nose. He looks more regretful than embarrassed. “Maybe next time.”

“So what _did_ you do, Mr. Managed To Keep My Dick In His Pants?”

“Well, first I took a yoga class -”

“A what?” Lovett is doing an admittedly poor job of not judging Tommy’s choices, after Tommy has so graciously not judged his own.

“Your muscles were pretty tense, and there was a beginner class starting when I got to your gym,” Tommy says. “You might like it if you keep it up. It’s got a nice view. Room full of guys in leggings.”

“Sounds relaxing,” Lovett says with a wicked, conspiratorial smile.

“After that, let’s see. I worked out for a while, and then I got Mexican food.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to feed me?” Lovett’s outrage comes out weak, because it’s nice not to be running on an empty stomach for once.

“You said no bacon,” Tommy says. “There was nothing about chicken tinga tacos or the weekend pozole special.” He grins. “There might also have been a doughnut.”

All Lovett can do is shake his head and whisper, “Doughnut. A _doughnut._”

“Lovett, do you realize how much better food tastes to you than it does to me? Seriously. I don’t know if you have a better sense of smell, or more taste buds, or if your tongue is directly wired to your pleasure centers, or what, but I showed restraint. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Probably the same way you don’t have sex with literally everybody you meet.” Lovett goes into rant mode before Tommy can argue with this. “Listen. I have been attracted to four women in my entire life. Three were extremely butch, and the fourth was Beyonce in menswear. This is what it’s like to be gay. I have to assume that being straight is the opposite. And by that logic, you, sir, are no heterosexual.”

Tommy rubs his brow like this is a headache he’s been trying to cure since puberty. “That is technically true.”

“So you have this - this buffet of humanity to choose from, and as long as I’ve known you, you’ve dated one kind of woman. I just - I can understand having preferences for a long-term partner, but to ignore all those other possibilities, it seems like, I don’t know, I want to extend this buffet metaphor but I got lost.”

“It seems like a missed opportunity,” Tommy says. “I know that. I think about it more and more as I get older. But I’m a relationship guy. I’m not interested in racking up one-night stands to - to boost my diversity score. And whenever I do feel that, like, that possibility, I freeze. I get afraid of rejection, and of how it will reflect on me if I _do_ date them. So I wind up with what’s familiar.”

“Which has not worked,” Lovett points out.

“Not so far,” Tommy says.

Lovett gives himself a moment to think seriously about the repercussions of kissing Tommy. “All those years of flirting, and you thought I would reject you?”

“I thought you were being friendly,” Tommy says. “I thought it was how you are.”

“It _is_ how I am. But I still mean business.”

“So if I kissed you right now?” 

“I would not reject you,” Lovett says. “Or judge you.”

Tommy leans in. The stool teeters under him, and he hops down, leaving Lovett higher than him, bending down to kiss him. Tommy kisses softly, and Lovett thinks at first that he is hesitant or fearful. But this is just how Tommy kisses, like he is waking Lovett from a deep sleep, like the camera is going to pan out until they are tiny specks under the end credits of a romance movie they didn’t know they were starring in.

Tommy tilts Lovett’s chin away with a finger. “Can I have a day to think this over?”

“If you need to,” Lovett says. “But nothing good has ever come from taking a day to think things over.”

“That is demonstrably not true.”

“Okay, maybe not _nothing,_” Lovett says. “But this time. What are you going to figure out in 24 hours that you don’t know now?”

“It’s just a lot to get my head around,” Tommy says. “Maybe you’re right, and I won’t know anything then that I don’t know now. But I need to sort through it.”

“Okay,” Lovett says hollowly. “So I guess I’ll just… take my underpants and go then?”

“And your ID. Don’t forget that.” It’s about the cruelest thing that Tommy can say.

Lovett sucks in his breath. He should let Tommy have the time he asked for. But Lovett has never gotten anything he wanted by keeping his mouth shut, despite a lifetime of being told to do so. “So here’s the problem,” he says. “There are two ways this can go. The first one is, we decide to give this whole more-than-friends idea a whirl. Either it works, and we’re dancing together at our 40th wedding anniversary, or it doesn’t, and we’ve been friends long enough that we can say we gave it our best shot and move on. The second way it goes is, you think it over and give yourself a long, stupid list of reasons this could never work, which you then share with me. Then, we’re a couple of chickenshits who talked themselves out of even trying, but who still have to see each other every day, and we never really forgive ourselves and the whole Crooked Media empire crumbles because we were too cowardly to take a chance on ourselves.”

For a moment, Lovett thinks Tommy is going to burst into applause. Instead, Tommy says calmly, half laughing, “Man, never try to argue with a speechwriter.”

“That needed editing,” Lovett says.

Lovett kisses Tommy again. This time, they are less gentle.


End file.
